Video Size Guide — Dimensions for Every Platform

Two numbers decide whether your video looks native or amateur on a platform, and they are easy to confuse. The aspect ratio is the shape — the proportion of width to height, written like 9:16 (tall) or 16:9 (wide). The resolution is the actual pixel count, like 1080×1920. They are related but not the same: 1080×1920 and 720×1280 are both 9:16, just at different sharpness. The tables above give you the exact resolution to export for each format, and the ratio it corresponds to, so you never have to work it out by hand.

Getting the ratio wrong is the more visible mistake, because the platform has to force your video into its player one of two ugly ways. It either letterboxes — pads the mismatch with black bars, which on a vertical feed can shrink your visible video by more than half — or it crops, slicing off whatever sits outside its preferred shape, which is how captions and heads end up cut out of frame. Getting the resolution wrong is subtler: too low and the video looks soft; too high and, counterintuitively, it can look worse after the platform re-compresses an oversized file. The fix for both is the same discipline — shoot and edit in the highest quality you can, then export to the exact spec the destination wants rather than to whatever your camera happened to record.

That is the whole reason a reference like this exists. The specs are not secret, but they are scattered across eight platforms and dozens of formats, and guessing wrong costs you a re-export or a post that underperforms. Everything here is a fixed lookup — the page ships the numbers with it and renders instantly, with no lookup call to a server as you browse.

The single biggest shift in these specs over the last few years is the move from landscape to vertical. TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, Snapchat, and Facebook Reels are all built around 9:16 (1080×1920) because that is the shape of a phone held upright — a vertical video fills the entire screen, edge to edge, leaving no room for the distraction of the next post. That full-screen occupancy is a real advantage: it holds attention, and the platforms reward content that keeps people watching. If your video is going anywhere short-form and mobile, 1080×1920 is almost always the answer.

But vertical is not a universal rule, and treating it as one is its own mistake. YouTube's main feed is still a 16:9 landscape world — a long-form video, a tutorial, anything watched on a TV or a desktop monitor wants 1920×1080. LinkedIn and Twitter/X happily take landscape and square. And a square 1:1 or portrait 4:5 is often the smart middle ground for a feed post that needs to look right on both phone and desktop without committing to full vertical. The right shape is the one that matches where the video will actually be watched, which is exactly what the per-platform tables above are organized around — pick the platform first, then the format that fits your plan for it.

One practical consequence worth planning for: if you intend to post the same video in more than one place — a Reel and a YouTube Short and a landscape YouTube upload — you cannot serve all of them from one export. Either shoot with the tightest crop in mind and frame your subject centrally so a 9:16 and a 1:1 version both work, or plan separate exports. Deciding this before you shoot saves far more time than fixing it after.

Resolution is only half of what makes a video look sharp; the other half is bitrate — how much data per second is used to describe the picture, measured in Mbps. A 4K resolution with a starved bitrate will look blocky in fast motion, because there simply are not enough bits to render the movement cleanly. Every platform compresses your upload to save on delivery, and you do not control how hard — which is why matching their recommended size matters more than maxing out resolution. Give them a clean, correctly-sized file and their compression has less reason to butcher it.

There is one place where higher resolution genuinely pays off: YouTube. Uploading at 1440p or 4K, even for content that does not strictly need it, nudges YouTube toward assigning a more efficient codec (VP9 or AV1) rather than the older H.264, and that codec delivers a visibly cleaner image at the same viewing size. It is a quirk of how YouTube tiers its encoding, and it is the reason the "shoot in 4K even for a 1080p audience" advice persists for that platform specifically. On Instagram or TikTok, by contrast, oversizing gains you nothing and can cost you quality after their compression pass.

The takeaway is not a single magic number but a habit: export at the platform's recommended resolution and a healthy bitrate, and let their pipeline do the rest. When a format's hard limits matter for your upload — a maximum length for an ad, a file-size cap — those are the numbers most likely to change over time, so confirm them against the platform's current help pages; the resolutions and ratios in the tables here are the stable part you can rely on.

Exporting at the right size is not quite enough on vertical platforms, because the video does not get the whole screen to itself — the app paints its own interface on top of it. On a Reel or a TikTok, the caption, the username, the music credit, and the like/comment/share buttons all sit over the lower and right portions of your 9:16 frame. Anything important you place there — a caption you added in editing, a logo, the punchline text — can end up hidden behind those controls. The rough rule is to keep essential text and subjects within the central column of the frame, clear of roughly the bottom fifth and the right edge, and to check a real preview in the app before you consider it done.

This is also why the "notes" column in the tables above flags things like Stories' clear-zone at the top and bottom — those are the spots the interface eats. Frame with them in mind from the start rather than discovering the problem after upload. A helpful workflow is to add a temporary overlay in your editor marking the unsafe regions, keep your text inside the safe area, then remove the guide before export.

One last honest note on this page itself: it is a static reference, so the numbers load with the page and there is nothing to submit or generate. Like the rest of the site it does run standard analytics and ads, so it is not a "zero-tracking" page — but there is no tool input here to send anywhere, because you are only reading specs. When you are ready to build the post around your correctly-sized video, the thumbnail and other creator tools pick up from there.